Mark Twain needs no introduction. And fair warning, The Complete Short Stories took me a year to read, not a summer. On the plus side, this collection took "complete" to heart. Even stories that appear in longer books, but can be read stand-alone, are included.
The stories range from rambling, plotless tales to morality stories usually about the the perils of assumptions and misplaced faith. Frequently, the story you start reading seems abandoned and you end in a completely different story altogether. Almost all of the stories are told first person, ala the oral tradition Twain's prose mimics. He also regularly interrupts the narrator as the author, giving his work an audited feel.
There are a few stories worth specific note. Everyone familiar with Twain will know "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." His first short story, it is classic Twain, but a poor representation of the breadth of Twain's style. There are shockingly few stories that have the same countrified narration. Twain satirizes every walk of life in America and Europe across history, and, although he brings a distinct Americanism to his writing, he comes off more cosmopolitan than you would expect.
"A Double Barreled Detective Story" is unusual because Twain interrupts to explain a joke, an interruption that lasts for several pages. The reader is unsure if Twain's stated reasons are true (he says people wrote him about the paragraph, but there is no way to tell real author's notes from contrived ones) and why the story even needed the joke to begin with because the style shift is very dramatic for a single unconnected paragraph. Here is the offending (yet brilliant) paragraph for your perusal (the less obvious contradiction is in bold).
"It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept on motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God."
Taken as a whole, Twain's short stories read like Aesop's fables, Grimm's fairy tales, and PG Wodehouse thrown in a blender, although even that doesn't hint at all the genres he spoofs. While no single story compares to the finesse of plot and character found in his classic novels, there may not be a better Twain primer in existence.
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